FAQ

Let’s be honest. Who likes to do what he’s not really good at? On the other hand, to get better at anything, one must understand and practice it rather frequently. Therefore, it becomes catch twenty-two: no understanding, no practice, no success, and no desire to learn.

We all can be divided into two categories – those who love math and those who can love math. The good news is that everyone, including kids, has natural talents. Some of us have good memory. Some can vividly describe things using language. Yet, others would rather draw pictures. Some learn by watching and some by listening. Often a talent can be dormant until it is woken up. We learn and understand in a variety of ways. Success comes from learning to utilize all your different talents and abilities, make them cooperate and enhance each other.

There are a couple of reasons. On one hand, research shows that an average school curriculum has significantly less time allocated to math than English and other language-based disciplines. On the other hand, language skills are much easier to practice. Children talk; listen to spoken language, read and write. Math is a different story. There may not be enough opportunities outside of school to practice math and thus developing those skills into “second nature”. In addition, technological progress has lessened the need for people to exercise math skills in a wide variety of day-to-day activities.

Well, reading and speaking do not require pencil and paper, but math learning is heavily pencil and paper based. When the math class is over and the workbook is put away, math practice is over. What if children were taught to do math mentally? Then their “pencil and paper” would be with them all the time, practice would rarely stop and results could be much more impressive.

Absolutely! A slightly different approach is needed however. People speak languages to communicate. Mathematics is a very special “language” to communicate structured information about things and actions. It is a language “spoken” by more people in the world than any other. If we look at math this way, the same fluency in math can be achieved as in spoken language. At the same time, it can actually be easy and fun!

Actually, since the methods suitable for mental math are better aligned with the way human brain processes information, it is more logical and easier to comprehend and train on. Everyone can learn to do it. People who excel at mathematics use better strategies than the rest of us; they are not necessarily more intelligent.

No doubts! All calculations involve pattern-recognition and are rule-based, in other words they make sense, and there is less room for careless mistakes while speed and accuracy are much higher. Most importantly, students learn to solve the same problem using different methods, adopt the ones that best suit their learning style and thinking, and often develop their own strategies.

You are not alone. Math is a human activity and should be learned as such. Solving a problem requires following multiple steps, and each step could be a sequence of even more granular steps. The more complex the problem, the more steps are involved. As children progress to higher level math, it is assumed that they already became proficient in all those little processes so the larger problems can be solved quickly. Unfortunately, learning math in lower grades tend to be memorization, or fact, based. With math concepts being based on other concepts being based on other concepts and so on, this approach has obvious limitations. It is dry and boring for most students. What is even worse is that if memorized facts “fade away”, there is no practical way to “restore” them other than to memorize them all over. Our curriculum is designed to reduce fact memorization to a bare minimum and concentrate on the process, logic and reasoning instead. This approach produces solid results and teaches skills that are practical, reliably repeatable and highly scalable.

Learning and, most importantly, retaining solid knowledge in mathematics requires incremental skill building. First and foremost element in this process is good foundation. Children have different amount and quality of knowledge and skills.

For example: when learning about fractions in higher grades, you need to know addition, subtraction, multiplication and division as well. If you don’t know any of the 4 basic skills, fractions are very hard to do, and no calculator will help you!